Neonatures

NeonaturesSkyscraper collectives, agglomerations, alignments, bundles, clusters, and twins; mixed-use developments, high-rise housing developments, waterfront and marina developments, luxury condominiums; airport hubs, corporate office enclaves, industrial parks, hotel complexes, conference centers, commercial, financial centers; satellite cities, theme parks, thematic cities, new districts, gated communities: what is the potential latent in extraordinarily large urban typologies, still restricted by the typological tradition of urbanism and by the predominant segregation of disciplinary domains? What is the reach of this misused potential as a means to think aggressively about the urban environment, and as a medium to envision and breed future developmental models at a time when the relationship with nature has become one of equals?\'…the destiny of humanity depends upon the attainment of its highest type.\' Friedrich Nietzsche, \'The Will to Power\'Similarly to the cybernetic experiment that illustrates a systemically imbalanced economy with the example of breeding ever larger horses, which, as they grow in size, loose the capability to sweat the volume of water that their body mass requires, the exponential discrepancy between the interior volume of large-scale developments (inflated to extremes where they take over entire geographical regions), and the surface area of their containing envelopes (increasingly banal, blank, and convoluted), tends to produce an altogether new organizational potential, a potential that forecasts the prospect of unfolding the benefits of the metropolis into the territory and, in turn, of folding the formal characteristics and assets of the latter in the former, thus challenging the modernistic notions of nature and urbanism through a superseding dialogue of equals. \'Must we distinguish two battles: the historical war waged by Achilles against his enemies and the blind violence done to the river?\' Michel Serres, \'The Natural Contract\'It has become increasingly evident that contemporary development is taking both the relationship between urbanism and nature – and the spectrum of the discipline of architecture itself – to a condition of qualitative change and a status that can be regarded as \'catastrophic,\' where urbanism can be conceived as an extraordinarily large form of artificial nature operating within and together with nature, and where architecture as a discipline is compelled to configure new models to incarnate both the metropolitanization of the territory and the deterritorialization of traditional forms of urbanism, by integrating both processes within a single and ubiquitous building structure, following the tradition of utopian architecture, this time paradoxically, and via a straightforward and passionate engagement with in principle banal urban typologies.\'The highest men live beyond the rulers, freed from all bonds; and in the rulers they have their instruments.\' Friedrich Nietzsche, \'The Will to Power\'Neo-natural architecture is the complex assemblage of extraordinarily large forms of development, and their containment, breeding and branding through highly naturalistic artifacts, operating as single yet multiplicitous architectural compounds, at the same time volatile and sturdy. Neonatures host a variety of models of organization and degrees of urban concentration in an individual geo-architectural form, which operates as a paraphernalia of services, interior design, technology, and infrastructure. Neonatures steer unpredictable programmatic coexistences and unprecedented organizational collaborations within a poignant naturalistic being, giving substance and substantiation to an apparently prosaic take on utopia: an archaic form of power, situated beyond urban goods and evils: both \'?within\' nature and \'as if it were\' nature.\'Achilles, king of w